Oh Sure, *Now* It Picks Up

Now that I have three days left here, things are really getting busy, and I feel like I’ve got more stuff to do than time in which to do it. I have a feeling that my office time in Karachi will be spent working on this project, because I still have no idea what, if anything, I’ll be doing there, and I’ve got plenty to keep me busy here.

The new PM (whose name bears a striking resemblance to Darth Vader, so I’ll just call him Darth) is…well, he’s very nice, but he’s also kind of a human Quaalude. We were having a team meeting yesterday and he kept telling me and the resettlement expert what we needed to include in our section for the inception report. Well, I had written my section, including all of those things, two or three weeks ago. I also gave him what I had written when he arrived last Monday. He said he read it, but couldn’t possibly have really read it, or he would have known that a) I’ve been busting my rear end on this and b) what he wanted to include in this report had already been included. It got really frustrating, to be honest. I also had to explain to him at least three times that I’d been waiting for a week and a half for a translated letter and hadn’t gotten it. I’m sure Darth is very good at his job, and like I said, he’s a very nice guy, but man does he do things differently than I do.

A bunch of us went out to dinner last night and the Senior VP kept making digs at D and I for not wanting to decide on the spot to move to halfway around the world for a job we weren’t interested in. If nothing else, my experience with him yesterday has me not wanting to work directly for him ever. He just has a really different philosophy than I do, and fortunately for me, my boss doesn’t really share it. But the continuing guilt trip was getting irritating. The Sultan joined us for dinner and drinks, and then took us out to another watering hole – one that D had seen in a guidebook called Lost in Saigon. What the guidebook didn’t tell her was that it was a gay bar. I honestly wouldn’t have known, because there weren’t many people there to begin with, and the ones that were there were a mix of male-female couples, groups of people just hanging out – I actually don’t think I noticed any gay couples, come to think of it. Nonetheless, it was kind of funny. The Sultan once again gave us a lift home, which was very nice of him. We’re all getting together for dinner tonight because one of the Senior VPs from DC, who I know very well, is in town. This could mean that the Sultan will miss dart night tonight, and that I, by extension, will miss dart night.

*sigh*

Well, I’ll just have to come back, then. It’s been ages since I’ve played darts, I have a feeling that my game is going to be a little rusty. Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, or HCMC, or whatever you want to call it, really is a fun place, I wouldn’t mind spending more time here. I have a feeling that I’ll have that opportunity, about which I’m really kind of pleased. But I also have a feeling that I won’t know about whether or not I’ll be back here until shortly before I have to leave. Well, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into next time!

Next time I’m about to leave to go abroad, I’d appreciate it if you all could do me a big favor, and clearly repeat the following sentence to me: DO NOT BUY PAINTINGS OR ANYTHING THAT DOESN’T FIT IN YOUR LUGGAGE. D and I just had a 90 minute odyssey trying to ship two paintings I bought – one large-ish, and one on the small side. At first, I was just going to go to the post office, but then I wondered if they would really be reliable. Maybe, I thought, I should see if I can go to UPS or something. Well, we found the UPS place, not far from the office, and she informed me that it would cost $240 to ship. And they didn’t take credit cards. And that price was ridiculous. (Well, she didn’t inform me of that part, I concluded that independently.) So I decided to try the post office. The reason I was doing this at all is because they’re canvases that are already stretched and framed, and the framing here cost a teeny, tiny fraction of what it would cost in the US. So, even if I’d forked out $240 for shipping, which I wasn’t going to do, it still would have been cheaper than getting the canvases and having them stretched and framed at home. That would have easily been close to $1000. I got to the post office, and they said that it would cost a little over $100 to ship them by air – at which point I said that was fine. It was more than I’d spent on the paintings, including the frames, but it was fine. Grr… But the lovely people at the post office then proceeded to custom-make a box for me that fit both paintings, cut Styrofoam packing to fit the box and make sure they’d be protected, and taped that puppy up within an inch of its life. Looking at the enormity of the box that I was shipping, I started to think that, perhaps, $113 to ship it from Saigon to Washington, DC wasn’t so unreasonable after all. (But $240 was definitely still ridiculous.) The more time I spent at the post office, the more my confidence grew, so I’m hoping that, in a few weeks, they’ll arrive at my parents’ house, safe and sound. (It’s Air Mail, but it’s still coming from Vietnam, so I’m not expecting it any time really soon. Packages to Pakistan from the US took a few weeks, after all.) But after all that, I bought D lunch, as a thank you for her patience!

So, lesson learned. I am never doing that again. The smaller painting is a really beautiful original painting by a young painter who works in the art gallery downstairs, the larger one is a copy of something (I’m pretty sure that it’s not famous) by the same guy, but he did a really beautiful job with it. And although I am incredibly grateful that they are now out of my hands, and I’m sure I’ll be glad to have them home, I really don’t want to have to deal with that again! Although, the post office here actually did make it relatively painless, it just took a while.

At the moment, as a bunch of people from the office are off on a trip out to the field, and D and I are working away (even though I’m taking a writing break), Darth is calmly sitting at his desk, leafing through a magazine. He’s supposed to give a presentation in Hanoi the day after tomorrow about the project, which is about a month behind. He knows that there are things that are just plain ol’ not done. And…he’s calmly reading a magazine about highways or something. This is one of the other ways in which he and I do things differently, I suppose. I can procrastinate with the best of them, just ask anyone who lived with me in college – it was always obvious when I had a big test or paper coming up, because my room would be spotless, as cleaning was one of my prime procrastination tools. HOWEVER, I always reached that “fish or cut bait” point, where stuff just had to get done, so it did. Maybe Darth has a different FOCB threshold than I do, I don’t know. But it’s definitely crunch time, so you’d think he’d want to focus on things that were, oh, I don’t know, useful. I know – maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it’s a really good article.

Darth just made dinner reservations for the group tonight. He said that we’re going to a Vietnamese place, where you can get snake, dog, and everything else you could ever want. Can’t tell ya how excited I am about that. I’m hoping that, included on the list of everything else I could ever want are vegetables. I actually quite like Vietnamese veggie food, and I’m sure that there will be plenty of it. Here’s hoping!

I’ll be home two weeks from tomorrow, which means I’ll be in London one week from tomorrow. It’s going to be so very nice, I can’t wait! After being away so long, I can’t believe that my return home is finally almost here!!